Category: Vegetarian

the memory remains

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It has been a little while now since The Food Show, and I’ve eaten most of the loot I bought therein. There’s a little bit left – some preservative-laced ageless salami, the occasional lonely sprout, half a tub of yoghurt. And the Lindt chocolate is sitting in my wardrobe, waiting for that special chocolate recipe. Most of the good stuff is gone though. However since blogging about eating food is a somewhat slower process than just eating food, it has taken me a little while to get round to discussing how I used my purchases.

Some of the yoghurt and sunflower seeds went into a batch of banana muffins. The bagels got eaten in a matter of hours. The mirin I bought made me wish I’d come across it years ago. And the white chocolate Lindt chocolate balls, the very thought of which are making me a little dizzy with wanting right now, I think I inhaled them accidentally while blinking or something.

I devised this salad in my head on a break at work and was pleased with how it sounded – roasted kumara and radish salad with chorizo, halloumi, brocolli and organic sprouts. I was looking forward to it, imagining peppery radish with the sweet kumara, searing hot halloumi against the cool sweet crunch of sprouts, the paprika-d chorizo whispering an oily hymn to the verdant brocolli.

I presented it triumphantly, sat down smugly, held my fork aloft and then cursed loudly. I’d forgotten to add the chorizo. Even though it was sitting right there in the fridge and was one of the main components of the meal. You’d think I would have learned. Time and time again it is proven that if I have an idea and don’t write it down, I’ll forget half of it. Even if it’s something really fundamental to what I’m doing, I’m reliably unreliable.

Luckily the chorizo-less salad was delicious.
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If you’ve never roasted radishes before – and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, the idea never occured to me until I read it in Jo Seagar’s The Cook School Recipes. Drizzle a little olive oil over the halved radishes, and bake at 220 C for 20-40 minutes till they are slightly darkened and caramelised in places. They retain that familiar peppery tang but softened somehow, which worked marvelously with the buttery, chewy halloumi draped over. Seriously, I love halloumi so much it’s a good thing it’s nosebleed-inducingly expensive or I’d be absentmindedly frying up entire blocks of it to eat while I think about what I’m going to make for dinner.
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The halloumi in question was Canaan, and marvelously wonderful stuff it is too. Tumbled over the salad were organic Wright sprouts, also bought at the Food Show. And as you now know, the bargain chorizo remained quietly in the fridge… I wish I hadn’t used it recklessly in some tossed together dinner this week though because upon reflection, Nigella has a LOT of recipes using chorizo and as we hardly ever have it in the house, well there goes a prime opportunity to try out more of her recipes.
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This following dish – Slow Cooked Lamb with Cumin, Cinnamon and Feijoas – was actually made before the food show but I have never got round to blogging about it, and while it’s very different to the above meal gosh darnit it’s my party and I’ll attempt to dovetail disparite culinary themes if I want to.


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First of all I softened one finely chopped onion and an intimidating amount of garlic in my lovely non-stick pan (not one of those pans that just masquerades as nonstick, this one really doesn’t require oil) then tipped in a hefty pinch of cumin seeds, stirring for a bit before adding cubed lamb shoulder that I’d tossed in a little flour. I stirred quickly to brown the meat on all sides then added two carrots, sliced into batons. In went a can of chopped tomatoes, which I then rinsed out with enough water to just cover the meat. After a sprinkling of ground cinnamon, the pan lid went on and the whole lot simmered away for a good long time on a low heat. After a while I took the lid off to try and allow the liquid to thicken somewhat, before stirring in a slice of finely chopped preserved lemon, and the thickly chopped flesh of about six ripe feijoas. Finally I stirred in some spinach, allowing it to wilt before serving over couscous.

It was a bit of a gamble – I made this up on the fly – and I wasn’t entirely sure if feijoas wouldn’t be a bit too freaky with lamb. But, it makes sense – other stews pair lamb with dates, or dried apricots, or figs, so why not feijoas? Their sweet, tangy, elusive flavour and grainy texture contrasted deliciously, with the preserved lemon’s pronounced salty sourness offsetting the warmth of the cumin and cinnamon. The sweet-and-salty element to the stew made it quite moreish, and it was a perfect lazy Sunday dinner. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a country where feijoas aren’t available, then by all means substitute dates, dried apricots…a diced pear might work deliciously as well. But if you’re in New Zealand, they’re surely not going to get any cheaper at the market: now’s the time, the time is now. I got mine for 99c a kilo which is pretty hard to beat.

Work is a bit on the exhausting side and Wellington remains resolutely arctic which is why this post may or may not be up to my usual luminous standards. Unless you’re stinking rich, New Zealand houses tend not to have airconditioning, but in Wellington flats (and I’m sure elsewhere) just some simple honest building insulation would be appreciated. I feel like I wear more clothes to bed than I do to leave the house. That said, this place is warmer than our old flat, where the ground in our room was – I kid you not – permanently damp (a good way to discourage leaving clothes on the floor), we had a hole in our window covered with newspaper, and on more than one occasion we’d rug up in layer upon layer of clothing only to discover it was warmer outside than in. Anyway, musn’t grumble as we are both very fortunate to (a) have a roof over our head, crumbly like a Weetbix or otherwise, and (b) relatively secure employment.

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On Shuffle while writing this:

Machismo, by Gomez, from the album Machismo

Frei und Schwerelos (Defying Gravity) by Willemijn Verkaik from the Wicked Original German Cast Recording

Basket Case, by Green Day from Bullet In A Bible: Live at the Milton Keynes Bowl

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Next time: I’m not sure, although I feel like I’m about due to revisit Nigella again – it’s one thing to be inspired to create my own recipes but I miss her…

the hardest butter to butter

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Maybe in years to come, when my blog has changed lives, and gets turned into a beautiful book, and then the movie of the book of the blog changes peoples’ lives (oh wait, that’s Julie and Julia that I’m thinking of, and somewhat more feasibly, I’ll probably slide quietly into further obscurity), and a naive child asks their grandparents what the ultimate blog post that would describe Hungry and Frozen would be, what the very distilled essence of this whole strange business is, the ur-text, the definitive piece of writing, their grandparents might lean down and utter with a wise, earthy croak: The one where she made her own butter.

I call this one: Self Portrait.

Okay, whoa, things got self absorbed there for a bit, but such is the nature of blogging. I’ll be straight with you: I love butter. I don’t know what it is, there’s definitely the soft, creamy, golden, slightly saline flavour which plays a part. But then there’s also the texture, something that can’t be imitated. It’s a texture echoed in other good things – dark chocolate, pistachios, avocados… I just love it. Somewhat aggressively. I love what it does for cakes, I love butter icing on top of cakes, I love butter smeared thickly across freshly made scones which also have butter in them…I’m not the only person like this, right? Not to mention my strident rejection of margarine. I don’t mind cakes with oil in them, some are just supposed to be that way, but don’t get me started on margarine – I’ll go all twitchy. Anyway, some other lovely bloggers (like Culinary Travels and Tea and Wheaten Bread) have made their own butter recently, which inspired me to do it myself – it seemed so right somehow. Making butter. By hand. Being at one with it. Well, more so than I normally am…

It’s simple enough, but there are some rules to be observed. Rather like the movie Fight Club, which, by the way, I’m secure with never having seen because I know it will be light years too violent for me to deal with. Thanks to its Wikipedia page though, I’m still able to discuss it critically with people who actually have watched it.

The first rule of making butter is: You need far more cream than your ability to gauge will let you think you will need, and then some.

I used a litre, which in America you could also see as four measuring cups full, of cream. To add further confusion, you’d want to make this double, or heavy cream, if you were in Britain or America respectively, since our cream in NZ is just called ‘cream’ and we don’t tend to have divergence into ‘single’ or ‘double’.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Appalling lack of culinary unity aside, 1 litre/four cups cream will yield around 400-500 grams of butter. You’ll also get about 250mls/1 cup of gorgeous buttermilk. Where the rest goes, I don’t know. I can’t pretend I know much about science, which I suspect could go some way to explaining this conundrum.

The second rule of making butter is: Keep going. Don’t stop when it looks like this picture below.

Why yes, when I make stuff by hand I mean by hand. A somewhat deranged venture, I grant you, whisking a litre of cream into stiff peaks. But my justification was, if I was going to make butter I might as well really do it, not remove myself from any of the process. Just as I love kneading bread by hand, not in a machine, so it follows that whisking cream doesn’t really bother me.

I do use the electric beaters, it’s just when all’s said and done, and you’ve finally found the machine in the bottom draw with the potatoes and onions, located the beater that fell behind the oven and the other one which was behind the pots and pans, sitting quietly in a plastic chinese take-out container, it’s probably quicker and easier just to grab a whisk.

The third rule of making butter is: It involves a degree of messiness.

At some point it will separate – often quite suddenly – into tight, nubbly little curds, and thin, whitish buttermilk. At this stage you want to drain off the liquid – don’t throw it away though, it can be used in baking, or soup, or you could actually drink it – and I found it pays to squeeze out the curds themselves into the receptacle for the buttermilk as they hold a lot of liquid.

At this stage, you cover the butter-to-be in water and knead it – that’s right – then discard the water, repeating this until the water stays clear while you’re kneading it. I understand this step helps to make it last longer.

From here you can keep the butter as is, or knead in some salt. In New Zealand 99% of our butter comes salted, it doesn’t taste salty in the slightest, just a little…fuller. Nevertheless it’s what I’m used to so it’s what I did. Like all the hip young things these days, I too have some pink Himalayan salt (gifted to me by one discerning Santa Claus) which I carefully kneaded into the primrose yellow lump of dairy – about 1 1/2 teaspoons. Go easy at this stage because you can always add more salt later.

And then…

Cue the Halleluja chorus. Using only two ingredients – fresh New Zealand cream and Himalayan salt, I made actual butter. It’s really that colour too – I don’t know where all the yellow hides when it’s in cream form, but you whip it up and suddenly it changes colour. That night I made scones using the buttermilk, and the taste of the butter melting slowly onto the tender scones was spectacular. Please note the adorable pink silicone container, which is actually a mini loaf dish, a birthday present from my aunty Lynn, as was the pink silicone mini heart which I used to make my couer-a-la-beurre at the start of this post.

So as you can see making your own butter is easy, so easy that you can make some and suddenly get an inflated ego and entertain fanciful notions of your blog being turned into a movie starring Hollywood heavyweights and indie flick darlings.

Speaking of things that are wildly important to me: If you happen to be in the vicinity of the good village of Otaua tomorrow, please visit the Mighty Otaua Village Garage Sale at the Otaua Village Hall (established in 1985!). This is by no means limited to people of Otaua, if you are from Waiuku, Tuakau, Pukekohe, any nook or cranny in the wider Franklin region, heck, if you’re anywhere in the Waikato why not make a scenic trip down to Otaua. You can (a) scout out some ridiculously cool bargains in a recession-tastic manner, and (b) support a tiny village who are trying their best to fight against the ugliness of WPC Ltd who want, of all ill-conceived ideas, to relocate their waste oil treatment plant to Otaua Village.

If you can’t make it to Otaua then why not shake your fist at WPC Ltd and the potentially devastating effects of their aims in a virtual way by watching the song on youtube that my father wrote (and videoed!) to protest their actions. For those of you that have been reading this blog for a while, this venomous typing will probably come as no surprise, but for those of you who are newcomers to this strange land, check out the Otaua Blog for the full rundown on the ignorance of WPC Ltd. Ugh, it’s totally ruined my butter high just thinking about them – I’m typing all angrily, hitting the keys hard – I feel like I’ve just seen some margarine or something – so let’s try to keep it positive: get yourselves down to Otaua Village for the sure-to-be-awesome Garage Sale.

It has been a busy week – on Monday Tim and I saw Dylan Moran (of Black Books fame) who was, despite being visibly weary as so many stars are by the time they get to New Zealand on their tours, deliriously funny. We were fortunate enough to meet him at the stage door afterwards, he said no photos but signed our ticket happily enough. On Wednesday we were at Bodega for Okkervil River, who were delightful, friendly, generous of encore. The venue, however, was troublingly warm. So warm that I could barely concentrate, let alone applaud. On top of that, work has been pretty manic and suddenly it’s Friday already. Which is why I was glad to get home early and bunker down with some chicken noodle soup away from the cold tonight.
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On Shuffle while I wrote this:

Blank Generation, by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, from the album Blank Generation
Santa Fe, from the Rent Original Broadway Cast Recording
Central Park by Mark Kudisch from the See What I Wanna See Original Cast Recording (Kudisch can currently be seen on Broadway’s 9 to 5, rocking a moustache like he was born wearing it.)

Next time: Well, Tim and I are both graduating on Tuesday, which is very exciting, so I may be relatively quiet until then. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Peace.

rock the oat

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There is something almost blissful about a Sunday where it’s raining softly and you have no pressing tasks ahead of you. I’m the first to acknowledge that there’s nowt more depressing than a quickly diminishing Sunday afternoon, but a gentle rain and a little slothfulness can counteract that swiftly. Right now I’m casually blogging and shmoozing the internet. Later on I’m going to make some bread rolls – in itself something best done when you have time to knead the dough and let it rise – and shape meatballs which will be simmered in rich tomato sauce. On a Saturday this might be a bit too slow-paced, not exciting enough. But on a rainy Sunday – perfect.

Before I get too nauseatingly earnest…I spent yesterday perambulating between the kitchen and my computer with equal laziness. Not that it was a day wasted – Tim and I were up at 4.50am to get to the dawn service. For those of you who don’t have a working knowledge of New Zealand, 25th of April is ANZAC day, a time of remembrance and acknowledgement for those who have participated and lost their lives in war. (The acronym stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps.) Although largely associated with WWI, it encompasses all those who have served. I won’t go too far into it because you’ll be able to tell that I’ve just reworded stuff from Wikipedia. I got home from the dawn service at about 7am (I had to walk up the hideous hill as the cable car wasn’t open) and excitedly anticipated having the whole day ahead of me to do necessary, productive things. Then I fell asleep for three hours.

World War I is of particular interest to me, probably influenced by my mother’s own enthusiastic study of this time. I’m not pro-war in the slightest, but the horrors of these times shaped New Zealand irrevocably and I am lucky enough to have visited several areas of Belgium and Northern France where young Kiwi men – some pathetically young – lie buried in graves that bear row upon unfathomable row of white crosses.
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Anzac biscuits are part of New Zealand baking tradition, not exclusive to any particular day, but what with the power of suggestion and all I decided yesterday, once I’d come to from my nap, would be as good a day to make some as any. The accepted story behind these biscuits is that Kiwi women sent them over to the troops in WWI because they were economic to make and kept well – but I don’t know for sure and again, one doesn’t want to appear to have plundered Wikipedia for information. Frankly, most of the ones you can buy in shops are really not that nice – all hard and mealy and undelicious. Much better made at home, and a gratifyingly buttery way to feel a connection with my country.
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ANZAC Bicuits (never, ever ‘cookies’.)
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As every recipe you will ever find is basically the same, I don’t feel the need to attribute this to anyone. I did, however, replace the normal white sugar with brown and up the butter slightly. And it produced a superior biscuit.
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150g butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
1 cup plain flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup dessicated coconut
1 teaspoon baking soda
Set the oven to 180 C/350F. Melt the butter, sugar, and golden syrup together gently in a pan over a low heat. Once it has formed a delicious caramelly puddle, stir in the dry ingredients. Dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water and mix it in quicky and thoroughly. Form mixture into small balls on a baking tray and carefully flatten with a fork (you may need to squish them together if the balls fall apart). Bake for 12 minutes, remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Above: Uncooked Anzac biscuits, ready for the oven. This recipe should make about 30. Having said that I ate a lot of mixture. Maybe it makes more than 30. You’d think I’d learn.
Once baked, they are far superior to anything you’ll buy from a shop. Buttery, oaty, a little crisp and – as I said last Anzac day – “chewy with tradition”, they are like apple crumble topping in cookie form. A seductive concept, yes? There’s little fancy or fussy about these biscuits but they’re child’s play to make and considerably economical as far as baking goes.
Earlier this week Tim and I were fortunate enough to see Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant in Push, a show that has been touring worldwide and made its way to Wellington. Once again, if you want to know the history of Sylvie Guillem’s life, Wikipedia will do a better job that I can (I don’t mean to sound all caustic, it just puts me off when blatant chunks of information that came from some site or other on peoples’ blogs appear sandwiched between the normal writing.) What you do need to know is that she is a legend in her field – dance – and widely considered one of the most brilliant dancers of modern times. She’s not young – for a dancer that is – and being as New Zealand is by and large geographically estranged from where anything exciting happens, it was an utter privelege to have the opportunity to see her.
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Guillem was so…limber. Like a flame, flickering across the stage. It was wonderful to watch someone utterly in control of their body, dancing with grace and ease and power. Maliphant was something of a revelation as well – and the two of them together were just faint-makingly beautiful. In the final piece of the programme they danced together as though there was a magnet connecting their bodies – Guillem would fling herself fearlessly at Maliphant and somehow land on his shoulder with one leg in the air. Not a hint of exhalation or exhaustion from either of them. The whole thing was just…exquisite. Celebrity alert – we saw the gorgeous Loren Horsley, (from Eagle vs Shark with Jemaine Clement), and – somewhat unexpectedly – a man we were quite convinced was Danyon Loader, Olympic medal-winning swimmer. Also present were a lot of ballet-dancery type girls who reminded me that I will never be a ballerina. Nevertheless, I can still be someone who appreciates and loves dance, and someone who dances round the bedroom with my iPod on…someone who arabesques while drying and putting away dishes and who plies to pick up something off the floor…
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Finally: I still haven’t kicked this dirty cough that I have. It’s croupy, and worse from 6pm onwards – I end up coughing nonstop at about 2am, and my poor tired brain can’t keep up with it. Anyone have any ideas? I’d rather be a hippy and not get antibiotics if I can help it, and I know your grandmother had some kind of natural remedy you can share with me. For what it’s worth, I’ve been drinking my body weight in fresh ginger and lemon tea and have eaten a lot of garlic…any ideas muchly appreciated!
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Next time: I did some homemade beetroot ravioli last night, and will probably bake something frivolous between now and whenever I blog next. Can you believe April is nearly done? Coming up on the calendar- The Wellington Food Show, which I am ridiculously excited about and shall be blogging about with vigour. We’ve managed to secure tickets to see charming comedian Dylan Moran on the 11th and the band Okkervil River on the 15th, and then on the 19th it’s our graduation. Busy times ahead…
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New stuff! After every blog I’ll list three songs that came on shuffle while writing this blog. Why? Mostly narcissism probably, but also because I love music with a dark passion and I like the idea of possibly broadening your horizons, providing a little insight into who I am, or at the very least getting The Final Countdown stuck in your head.
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1: Let Me Drown – Brian D’Arcy James and Idina Menzel – The Wild Party Original Cast Recording
2: Mad Tom of Bedlam – Jolie Holland – Escondida
3: Farmer John – Neil Young – Weld

house of the rising bun

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While in my last post I extolled the joys of the five-day Easter weekend, I spent this whole week at work scrambling to get up to speed with everything. Hence, my lack of presence round here. The intention was definitely there, but the time didn’t materialise. Anyway the upshot of this is that if the food blogging world was a party, my hot cross buns would be Kate Moss, arriving scandalously late and with a fabulous rockstar on their arm, making everyone else wish they’d dared to be so louche and devil-may-care.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

As well as my seasonal buns, you can also look forward to a surprising amount of cafe reviews and a little shoutout to myself for being born upon a particular day (yesterday, if you’re wondering).

To provide a bit of context, I made my initial batch of hot cross buns on Easter Sunday. I’d just flown back to Wellington from Auckland where I saw The Winter’s Tale. It was a spellbinding production, for a three hour play it flew by and stellar performances were delivered by all, despite the fact that the theatre was far from full (cough ‘economic climate’ cough). I’ll be frank, I wasn’t wildly taken with Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet (and much less taken with Julia Stiles’ Ophelia) but in The Winter’s Tale he was fabulous, playing his character like the lovechild of Bob Dylan and Captain Jack Sparrow. But Shakespearean.

Before I went up to Auckland I scoured through my Cuisine magazines and sussed out where some fun foodie shops were so I could hunt them down and possibly part company with a business card or two for my blog while spending time and money therein. The fates (and possibly stupidity) were against me as I just couldn’t find a bus to Mt Eden, where said shops were located. I can’t say it served to endear the city to me, however I did spend a happy hour or so at the art gallery taking in the delightful Yinka Shonibare exhibition.

I also met a friend at Alleluya Cafe in St Kevin’s Arcade on Karangahape Road. Apparently it is the sort of place that attracts the sort of people that attracts the sort of words like “hipster” and “scene”, but it wasn’t intimidatingly so when I arrived on Saturday afternoon. My coffee, a long black, didn’t arrive but the guy behind the counter looked so shocked – nay, crestfallen, when I told him I’d been waiting for a while that I didn’t harbour any animosity, especially when it finally arrived with a complimentary biscotti and was the smoothest, mellowest black coffee I’ve had in forever. My friend and I shared a slice of lemon yoghurt cake, which was pleasant, and a piece of Jewish ginger cake, which was way good and still haunts my dreams a week later.

Alleluya Cafe
St Kevin’s Arcade, K’Rd, Auckland CBD
09-377 8424
Verdict: Ignore the sneaking suspicion that you’re not cool enough to be there because the coffee is gorgeous and it was worth the plane fare for that Jewish ginger cake alone.

Back in familiar Wellington and on a Shakespeare high, I got stuck into the joyful task of making hot cross buns following Nigella’s recipe from Feast. Everything was going well until the final hurdle. I burnt the sodding things. Considering they took the better part of the afternoon I was mightily unhappy, but I could only blame myself for letting them bake for too long.

Having said that it took only a bare amount of convincing to make another batch the next day. Upon closer inspection the burnt buns were still salvageable – I cut off and discarded all the severely blackened parts, bagged the lot up and put it in the freezer, where they will one day become the base of a warm, spicy bread and butter pudding. I can’t wait. For round two I tried an Alison Holst recipe, partly because I was intrigued by her method and partly because there’s something suspiciously trustworthy about her.

Hot Cross Buns

As I said, the method is a little unusual but don’t be scared – it’s seriously easy and the finished buns have a marvellous texture.

1 cup milk
½ cup hot water
2 T sugar
4 tsps/1 sachet active dried yeast
2 cups high grade strong bread flour
100g soft butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon salt
1 T mixed spice
1 T cinnarmon
1 t ground cloves
1 cup currants/sultanas
2-3 cups high grade strong bread flour

Place the first four ingredients into a large bowl, making sure that the liquid is neither too warm nor too cold before you add the yeast. Stir in the first measure of flour, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. This won’t take a heck of a long time – maybe half an hour.

Meanwhile, cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg, salt, spices and dried fruit. Following a suggestion of Nigella’s I added some cardamom seeds here which worked beautifully. The spices get really diluted in the dough so don’t worry about the fact that the measurements look large. When the original mixture has doubled in size and is looking spongy, mix in the fruit mixture and the second measure of flour. Knead till it comes together in a springy ball, then form into 16-24 buns. Arrange on a paper-lined tray, cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise, which they should do significantly. Don’t leave them for too long – trust your eyes.
Alison recommends a mixture of flour, butter and water rolled into thin strips for the crosses but I found that they tended to fall off after baking. Anyway, brush the buns with milk and lay the crosses o’er them. Bake uncovered at 225 C for 10-12 minutes till browned lightly.

Well Alison, you win this time. These hot cross buns were immensely delicious, filling the kitchen, as with many kitchens across the world, with a warm, cinnamony scent, like a hug in perfume form. I flagrantly added a handful of chocolate chips to the dough and…I liked it. A lot.

Needless to say, they were at their best still warm from the oven and liberally buttered. I’m thinking this recipe is definitely a keeper and would like to make these buns in other forms – without the crosses – throughout the year, as the basic recipe is too good to keep confined to one day in April.

Speaking of one day in April, yesterday was my birthday and I gotta say, I didn’t have high expectations. I almost forgot that it was coming up – it felt as though it was a shadowy date in the vague distance as opposed to being on the immediate agenda – and I’ve had a hearty cough getting the better of me this week, not to mention the fact that I was working. Nevertheless it turned out to be one of the nicest self-anniversaries I’ve had in a long time. Everyone at work was lovely – there were balloons and flowers on my desk, a coffee appeared out of nowhere, I was taken out to lunch and a homemade banana cake replete with candles was produced at the beginning of a three hour meeting in the afternoon, all completely unexpectedly. Extended family members from home sent me a kitchen blowtorch, which I’m quite wild to use on a crème brulee pronto, I had cards sent from dad and my great-aunty, and there were text-messages a-plenty. Mum, who is in Argentina, put a video of her charming classroom singing Happy Birthday to me in Spanish and English. With all of that it’s amazing I wasn’t weeping sentimentally the whole day. In case you are wondering, I am now 23, which is hopefully still young enough to be ‘interesting’ as a food blogger.

After work Tim and I bought a bottle of cheap red and found this adorable middle Eastern BYO called Casablanca to quaff it in. The service was perfect, the food was cheap, plentiful and fast, and the atmosphere was delightful. It’s not very fancy, but it’s fun, and the food tastes comfortingly home-made as opposed to assembled. A small plate of complimentary bread and dips appeared after we sat down, and we were asked if we were ready for our mains to be made after we finished our starters, both nice little touches that made the dining experience that much better. I wish I’d had my camera to take a photo of my taboulleh which was particularly delicious – full of verdant, fresh parsely and juicy tomato.

Casablanca
18 Cambridge Tce (off Courtenay Place)
Wellington CBD
04-384 6968
Verdict: It’s not the Logan Brown but it’s probably more fun (unless some kind benefactor wants to shout me dinner there and refute this opinion). The menu could charitably be described as succinct, but what’s there is nicely done. I can definitely see myself returning.

From there we spent a significant amount of time at one of my favourite haunts in town, a themed bar called Alice, tucked away down an unassuming side road off Tory Street. You tunnel through a quiet, curtained corridor and emerge into a softly-lit, split level room which seeks to recreate some kind of Alice in Wonderland experience. The drinks are expensive but classy and potent, and you can make them worth your while if you get one of the cocktails for two which comes in a teapot. The bar is much lower than the floor itself which adds to the surreal effect and there are framed illustrations from the novel and distorted mirrors everywhere. I’m not describing it very well but it’s a great place to sit for hours having cosy discussions about things that seem very important at the time, which is exactly what we did.

After concluding that the only way we’d get away with sitting there any longer would be to spend a small fortune on another cocktail, we decided to hightail it out of there for a fortifying coffee. I have to say, betraying my country village background maybe, that personally there is something hugely exciting about getting a coffee or a bite to eat late at night – it makes me feel deliciously sophisticated and worldly, and of course by being so excited about it instantly renders me distinctly un-sophisticated. But there you have it. We chose to patronise Deluxe, which is apparently something of a Wellington institution. It has so far always passed me by, because it’s only fairly recently that I’ve had more of an income to spend recklessly on coffee from funky cafes.

Deluxe is hugely popular in Wellington, even at 11.00pm we had to strain to find a table. I’ll be honest, our coffee wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I suspect this was due to the fact that it was late at night and we’d had a couple of drinks and were therefore perhaps not a priority for quality control. Which is a shame, if this is true, but it’s better than the idea that their coffee is generally below average, yes? I’ve certainly had worse, and the delicious chocolate brownie that Tim and I shared raised our opinion of the place. We sat there for about half an hour, pretending to be hipsters as we drank our late night black coffee and chuckled over the pithy content in Vice magazine. I think I’ll definitely try Deluxe again, as 11.00pm on a Friday night is hardly condusive to a thorough, well thought critique of a café.

Deluxe
10 Kent Terrace (Next to the glorious Embassy Theatre)
04 801 5455
Verdict: This place probably is too cool for us, but that won’t stop me returning to give it a proper scrutiny. As it is, my opinion doesn’t matter since it is constantly packed with customers.

This morning Tim and I met with our friend Dr-to-be Scotty at Roxy Café. I hastily snapped some photos of what we ate, the images aren’t great but the food was. Special mention must be made about the hash browns, which were large, crunchy without and deliciously potato-ey within, and quite the nicest that I’ve had in a long time. Good friends and hash browns is a winning combination and we had a lovely morning talking smack with Scott.

Above: My French Toast with fresh fruit (and I ordered a hash brown on the side.) The toast itself was great, and generous at three pieces, although I felt that the chopped apple, pear and banana that made up the bulk of my “fresh fruit” was a little cheap, could they not have stretched to a stone fruit or something? The hash brown was fantastic.

Above: Tim and Scott ordered big breakfasts with extra hash browns. According to Tim his poached egg was perfect, and of course you already know about the hash browns at this place. Although I was comfortably full after my meal, I found myself looking wistfully at the small but intriguing lunch menu, which features some delicious sounding choices. The service was fine, I like that they brought out a carafe of water right away, and the cafe itself was a cool and airy respite from the heat of the outside world this morning.

Roxy Cafe
203-205 Cuba St
Wellington City
04-890 3939
www.roxycafe.co.nz
Verdict: All I can think about right now is their hash browns. This place is very nice and I’d definitely like to try it out again, the pricing is pretty reasonable so this shouldn’t be an issue. They get an extra star for serving butter on a little dish with the big breakfasts. This sort of behaviour is to be encouraged.
If you made it through all that then congratulations. And I mean really reading it, not just looking at the pictures. There’s gold in them thar paragraphs.

Next time: While up in Auckland I bought a fabulous Italian cookbook which I’ve already delved into and of course you know how excited I am about my kitchen blowtorch. I forsee a creme brulee on the horizon…

instant karma

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What’s exciting about Easter when you’re a kid? The chocolate. When you work full time? The chocolate…and the five day weekend. Since I’ve finished uni the holidays have completely dried up so I’ve been anticipating this long weekend with glee for quite some time. Tomorrow I’m zooming up to Auckland to see the Bridge Project production of The Winter’s Tale (a play by this underground, cult author named Shakespeare) which has made its way round the world to New Zealand, leaving excellent reviews in its wake. Even at face value it’s interesting – the Oscar and Olivier award-winning Mr Kate Winslet, Sam Mendes is directing it and it features a jaw-dropping cast including Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Hall, and Sinead Cusack. For a Shakespeare nerd like me, it’s going to be one heck of an evening. Sunday morning I’ll be back in Wellington to make hot cross buns…and I’m almost as excited about that as I am about the play tomorrow.

For some reason, it has been forever since I’ve made couscous – the food so nice they named it twice. I can’t think why, other than I’ve been distracted by brown rice for too long, because couscous is the perfect fast food, just add boiling water and you’re good to go. I can’t think of any other starch that’s so utterly instant. Even after having a glass or three of wine at a a colleague’s farewell get-together on Wednesday, I was able to deal with it and make a perfectly acceptable dinner. If I’d had to make something that required more concentration, like a risotto, it’s quite feasible that I could have flagged the lot and headed out for fish and chips instead.

Just as easy as couscous is what I made to go with it – halved tomatoes, roughly chopped butternut squash, cauliflower florets and foil wrapped beetroot, bunged in the oven and roasted for an hour. Not fast, but also not requiring any great amount of thought or committment. When the veges were nearly ready, I heated cumin, coriander and fennel seeds with a dash of cinnamon and ginger in a dry pan, then added the couscous and mixed them altogether. At this stage they smelled heavenly – just the sort of spices you want to have on a chilly evening. Boiling water was poured over, I removed the pan from the heat and covered it with a plate. A bare minute or so later the granules of couscous were tender and swollen, and I forked through a little butter before dividing the lot between two plates. On top of this went the vegetables, a tumble of baby spinach leaves, and chopped capers and walnuts. For a dinner so simple, comprised of ingredients in such unadulterated form…it was delicious.

Today has been pleasantly blue-skied but you can tell it’s Autumn and not midsummer January – it’s chilly in the shade. Tim and I decided to capitalise on our time in the sun and set off towards the beautiful Botanical Gardens (or “the botans” as we call it), a mere ten minute walk from our flat to feed the ducks, a favourite activity of mine. Never mind that whenever we go we are the only twentysomethings amongst the toddlers and encouraging parents, it’s really fun. Tim and I got to the duckpond and noticed with trepidation that there were bits of bread floating untouched in the water. I tossed a morsel of bread hopefully towards the water where it landed with a splash, and was met with a look of disdain by one of the ducks. One of them – I swear – actually sighed. It slowly paddled towards the piece of bread and ate it dutifully before looking at me as if to say “Happy now? We’re full, give us some peace already!” I guess we weren’t the only people who had decided to feed the ducks that day.

Dejected, we left the duck pond. Fate had other plans though, because as we headed up the road to our flat, we were lucky enough to see a tui – one of New Zealand’s native birds – barely a metre and a half away from us in a tree, singing his wee heart out. If the ducks had complied and done what they were supposed to, we would have missed the tui completely. Must have been meant to be.

(photo care of google images – I’m good, but not that good)

For some reason there is quite a significant urban tui population in Wellington. Whenever I see them I always wonder if they go and visit the tui in the forests and countryside, and talk about inner-city pressure and complain that you can’t get a decent kowhai flower in the middle of the night or something. Anyway, I’ve never seen one so close before and this particular specimen was adorable – quite rotund and almost like something out of a Disney cartoon as its stomach puffed in and out comically while singing its distinct, discordant call. Presently, a second tui appeared and Tim and I decided that there was some kind of burgeouning courtship happening, because both of them engaged in this hilarious behaviour where they fluffed out their feathers, and coyly pretended to ignore each other while hopping from branch to branch. Eventually they flapped off together to another tree – I get the feeling Tim and I were cramping their style, and obstructing how they were trying in their way to be free. (ahem, can’t resist quoting Leonard Cohen unnecessarily there). I’m no audobon, heck, I’m not usually even that fussed on nature, but it was quite an enchanting moment and completely unexpected in this big-city setting.

Hmm. Somehow we decended into the ornithology round-up segment, my apologies for those of you who were expecting recipes and instead ended up with curmudgeonly ducks and rutting native birds.

By the time we got home I was hungry and managed to convince myself that the best course of action would be to make us some instant ice cream, as it would use up some of the fruit taking up space in the freezer, plus there was this bottle of cream in the fridge rapidly deteriorating. Nevermind that we’d just gone for a hearty walk, my need to create food comes first!

Yes, that’s right. I decided to make ice cream as a quick snack. But how? I hear you cry. Well, with the glazed eyes of a fifties housewife in an advertisement, I’ll tell you! Once you try this, no other foodstuff will satisfy!

I put two frozen, peeled bananas and about a cup of frozen boysenberries in the food processor and whizzed them to an appealing purple mess. Then, with the motor still running, I emptied in about 250mls cream. To explain it scientifically, the whole lot just kind of seizes together and turns into ice cream. The most deliciously textured, amazing ice cream you will ever try. The trick is to eat it right away, because freezing it for another day ruins the beautiful texture. Not only does the flavour of the berries shine through, you also get the delightful taste of fresh cream. And the colour is out of this world. All that in about 30 seconds and it fed Tim and I generously. For more people, just add more stuff. You could use any combination of frozen berries – or try with just frozen bananas. The important thing to remember is to keep the ratio of liquid to frozen fruit fairly even. You could of course use yoghurt, which wouldn’t be wrong, but I can’t emphasise enough how lovely the simple taste of cream and fruit is in this.

It’s just as quick to eat as it is to make, too. And yes, Tim did eat his out of a beer glass – or ‘barfighting mug’ as we call them. What can I say, he’s a student. I had mine in a Nigella Lawson measuring cup. What can I say, I’m weird. But seriously – make this stuff. It’s so good it actually deserves it’s own fifties-style Madmen ad campaign in celebration of it – something along the lines of: “with this instant ice cream, now I have more time to iron his shirts!”

I hope you all have a lovely Easter break and do whatever it is that makes you happy. As I said earlier, I’m pretty hyped up for my hot cross buns on Sunday, but the age old question must be raised – to add or omit chocolate chips? I know they’re not traditional, but then neither am I, and I did the trad thing last year…Any suggestions?

pie fidelity

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Do you ever get to that stage in a recipe, when perhaps the walls of your kitchen are schmeered with sugary paste and there’s butter in your hair and a light dusting of flour coats all surfaces and you kind of think to yourself “Why did I attempt something this ambitious?” You’ve decided to make a braised dish involving seven wine-based reductions that weren’t immediately apparent the first time you scanned the recipe, or maybe it occured to you that a poached meringue topped with toffee sculptures would be the perfect follow up to a meal, when suddenly it’s 10.30pm and you’ve used every pan in the house and have internal bruising from trying to whisk egg whites to stiff peaks.

Maybe I paint a slightly dramatic picture, but the pie I made on Wednesday night more or less fell into this category. Luckily, this high-maintenance girlfriend of a recipe was worth it eventually because it tasted incredibly good, despite my ham-fisted tendencies threatening to ruin it at every step of the way…

Based on a recipe I found in Cuisine magazine (and you can find the original recipe here) the idea is to roll a mixture of grated eggplant, crumbled feta, eggs, mint and dill up into sausages with buttered filo pastry then coil them round in a pie plate, to create a pie with a difference. I’ll be the first to admit that my own wobbly, bulging pie didn’t quite match the neat-edged vortex of filo of the picture in Cuisine. This could be due to filo pastry being incredibly fiddly – I seemed to tear it every time I set my pastry brush down. Also, I replaced the eggplant with grated zucchini but didn’t bother to let them drain in a colander and – getting what was coming to me – the mixture was quite liquid and difficult to wrangle.
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I very nearly considered biffing it all and ordering in a curry, especially when the filled rolls of filo kept breaking as I laid them in the pie dish. I also didn’t factor in how long it would actually take to bake (my advice to you all: factor in the time something will actually take to bake) so we had a relatively late dinner by the time it was done. Finally, it was a nightmare to slice up neatly. But luckily it tasted amazing, and how could it not, with all the good things in life like butter and pastry and feta appearing in such proportions. Would I try it again? Yes, and next time I’d be more careful in reading the instructions. And maybe renovate my kitchen so I have enough benchspace to deal with all the filo pastry. At present our benchspace falls into the “laughable to non-existant” end of the scale.

I took a slice to work the next day for lunch and waited hopefully for people to say “my stars that looks like a complicated, deliciously gourmet pie…what – you made it? What an asset you are to this company” But no-one did. Tasted good second time round though.

I had a day off in lieu from work on Friday. Tim and I went back to the Maranui Cafe thinking that at 2pm on a weekday it might be quiet. We thought wrong. It was packed, we had the choice of only two tables, and there was a steady stream of customers entering. I must say, my nerves were feeling a little jangled by the time we got there. You see – and I should perhaps warn you about the x-rated content here – on our way to the bus stop, I noticed a cicada resting casually – leisurely even – on my chest. I sort of froze up and flapped my arms ineffectually at Tim, who gallantly came to my rescue and flicked it away. Somehow it went down my top and decided to it quite apparent that my cleavage was not where it wanted to make a permanent home. At this stage I had no other option but to more or less remove my top. I’m quite thankful that ours is a quiet road. Because of this hair-raising incident we missed our bus – luckily they are fairly frequent – and between that, and the fact that the bus we did catch managed to break down twice on the way, I had a dark feeling that the whole thing just wasn’t meant to be.

But it was. We finally arrived in Lyall Bay, climbed the stairs up to the cafe, and were seated immediately near (but not right in front of) the picture window. I ordered the vegetarian big breakfast and the very act of doing so made me feel a little more calm. By the time it was ferried to me by the charming, friendly waiter, I’d graciously made my peace with the world (but not that wretched cicada.)

Above: The vegetarian big breakfast, called the “Victory Breakfast” on the menu. It’s dangerously good. I’d walk barefoot to Lyall Bay to taste those tomatoes again. Notice the generous dollop of pesto, and the size of the dark, glossy ‘shrooms. The 5-grain bread (from Pandoro) was so delicious I nearly fainted with every bite.

Above: As you can probably surmise from the vast quantities of meat, Tim ordered the non-vegetarian “Big Bay Breakfast”. He said the bacon was delicious and I can vouch for the quality of the kransky, as I audaciously stole a piece. The waiter who brought us our dish said there had been some kind of stuff-up out back with the poached eggs and said we were more than welcome to order fresh ones, but neither Tim nor I – fairly discerning when it comes to our eggs – had a problem with them.

Obviously this alone just won’t do. We were going to buy cake to share afterwards but we were both so visibly unenthusiastic about how it would reduce the actual cake-per-person ratio that we quickly decided to do the logical thing, which was to get two cakes to share.

Above: A plum and coconut tart with a chocolate pastry base and yoghurt. It was lovely – the coconut gave the tart a delightfully dense, moist texture which contrasted with the smooth, ascerbic slices of plum dotted throughout. The pastry gave a further contrast in flavours without being too sweet. The yoghurt was nice as an accompaniment but we mostly chose it because it was offered for free and we like to squeeze out every last drop of value-juice.

Above: The caramel star cookie had the most wonderful filling. I may be a little biased since I have an intense love of caramel flavours, but nevertheless it was a nice cookie. The biscuits themselves sandwiching the filling were pleasant enough and not overly sweet which I think was a good choice.

As with last time, the Maranui Cafe has earned my whole-hearted recommendations. It’s very easy to find as well – just jump on a number 3 bus to Lyall Bay. Although I have no idea what day of the week is best in terms of being relaxed about finding a table. I’ll be honest, I was more impressed by the savoury options than the sweet, although I will stress that they didn’t taste bought in and probably weren’t. I do find it rare that a cake or pudding in cafes will knock me off my feet with its deliciousness. This could be that I’m not eating at places that are super-expensive, but I don’t think it’s that big an ask.
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Now, I don’t run a cafe or restaurant, but is it that hard to make your own cakes and desserts? Surely you are running such an establishment because you actually like making food? I hate it when I go out to dinner and the meal itself has been amazing but then the blah, blatantly bought in pudding disappoints. Don’t even get me started on the state of the abysmal muffins you get served everywhere these days (especially at airport cafes – it’s a kind of fatalistic instinct I have that whenever I’m stuck in an airport I get the urge to spend money on overpriced cakes…) What companies out there are purposefully making these challengingly dry, unloveable muffins?Isn’t that appallingly wasteful, when their time and resources could be spent making quality cakes instead? I realise I’m talking about several things at once here but…any thoughts? Am I expecting way too much? I think not.

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In other news, Mum is still in Argentina and I’m loving reading about her escapades on her blog. Daylight savings has started here and while it means that it will be darker earlier in the day, I’m adoring this transition stage where you wake up in the morning and realise it’s earlier than your body thinks it is and you can go back to sleep – bliss! Finally, Tim and I are currently very, very into 30 Rock. I don’t tend to get into TV shows when they’re actually on TV as we have no reception and I prefer to just buy seasons on DVD where there are no ads, which is why we’re so late to this particular party. But it’s brilliant and densely so, with about 7 one-liners per humorous minute and Tina Fey has created a highly endearing main character in Liz Lemon.
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Next time: Not sure…although I suppose since Easter is a-coming I’ll probably try my hand at hot cross buns again.

won’t get fooled again

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Two things that cause within me a sense of intense anticipation and upon which there is much potential for happiness or dismay – a new cookbook, and a new avocado. You know what they are when you go into the shop, you know that they can be awesome, you might even pick them up appraisingly to gauge whether it’s worth your time and money. But it’s not till you get them home, open them up and try them out that you really know what they are like inside.

I’ve had a pretty fortunate run of things lately with my avocado buying – every last one of them has been firm but yielding, nuttily rich and buttery and as chartreuse as a satin blouse from 1995. I was able to take advantage of the fact that Tim was out one night last week and made myself a solitary dinner of grilled mushrooms (one of Tim’s least favourite vegetables), spinach, and a whole avocado. A private pleasure, is the avocado – I’m loathe to share once I’ve found a good one. If you ask me for a bite of mine I’ll probably sigh and roll my eyes and make you feel bad that you even suggested it. But after this particular dinner, even someone as elephantine of appetite as I had to admit that a whole avocado is way too rich for one person.
It was a pretty fabulous meal though, one that I think will definitely go in my little notebook of potential recipes that will pay off my student loan. I clamped two large, flat field mushrooms in the George Forman grill, and while they were stewing away I used my mezzaluna to make quick work of roasted peanuts, capers, and a slice of preserved lemon. This was spooned over the outstretched palm-like cavity of the mushrooms and grilled again for another couple of minutes until wonderfully fragrant. I crumbled feta on top of them and sat them on a bed of spinach leaves, and then chopped up my triumphantly green, whole avocado.
For something containing no carbohydrates and bugger all protein it was hugely filling. I don’t know if this is a well documented problem – The Foodie’s Dillema perhaps – or just a personal quirk, but does anyone else ever find themselves in that position where they are becoming uncomfortably full, but can’t stop eating because (in this case) the avocado is so delicious and I can’t waste the opportunity for this perfect avocado over something as trifling as my waning appetite? I’m not sure if I explained it well, but it’s a bit like how I always eat lots of food if it’s there for free, even if I’m not hungry…Don’t even get me started on the caveman-style, eating for the next six years that I do at buffet tables.
Anyway, please do try the mushrooms because they were amazing. There’s no point being modest and coy, they really were delicious. They’re gluten free and vegetarian to boot, although I guess you could leave off the feta and call them vegan and dairy free as well.
As I mentioned earlier, avocados and cookbooks have many similarities. I tried out a recipe from a new cookbook of mine recently, Jo Seagar’s The Cook School Recipes. It was my first recipe from this book and I was really excited and it went DRAMATICALLY WRONG. Is there a disappointment as disappointing as gathering together ingredients and time and excitement and ending up with a gluey, sticky, doughy mass instead of a cake? I don’t want this to stop you from rushing out and buying Jo Seagar’s book – the culinary version of getting back onto a pretty horse that bucks you I suppose.
But riddle me this: does the idea of a cake, made solely from 2 cans of crushed pineapple, 4 cups self-raising flour, 1 1/2 cups sugar and 3/4 cups dessicated coconut, mixed together and baked for 45 minutes not sound somewhat unlikely? I mean, I can handle the fact that there are cakes out there that don’t have butter in them, and not everything is leavened with eggs. And I really wanted this to be amazing, because I loved the idea of such a store-cupboard, economic-climate friendly, and delicious sounding cake. Unfortunately it was awful. Even baking it for a further hour and a half couldn’t turn it into anything resembling a cake and it was far too gluey to serve as some kind of exotic trifle base. But with the hat of resourcefulness upon my head I turned to the woman who will never let me down – Nigella Lawson – and found a way to at least turn the non-cake into something useable.
In her book Nigella Christmas, La Lawson has a recipe for these little truffly bonbon things made from crumbled fruitcake, melted chocolate, liqueur, and golden syrup, which are then rolled into balls and festooned with white chocolate and cherries to look like miniature Christmas puddings.
So I thought why the heck can’t I create pina colada truffles using the crumbled up pineapple cake instead of fruitcake? I used melted white chocolate (125g) and a splash of Cointreau along with the golden syrup (3 tablespoons) and using my increasingly sticky hands rolled this challengingly viscous mixture into small balls. Tim and I then set to with toothpicks spearing the chilled truffles and rolling them in melted white chocolate. A fun job, but truly, you need more melted chocolate than is humanly fathomable to coat these truffles. Ours started off luxuriously blanketed, but the ones towards the end were only kind of smattered in chocolate. The main thing is that they tasted curiously…wonderful. A fine example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
I am of course predisposed to like these since I’m a mad fiend for the white chocolate, but there is something appealing in the combination of chewy, fragrant interior and crisp smooth exterior. And I love not wasting food. Although a small voice in my head says that I would have saved more money had I just thrown the cheap cake in the bin rather than adding expensive chocolate, liqueur and more chocolate to it. But whatevs.
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Of course if you wanted to recreate these without damaging your nerves, go out and buy a sponge cake, allow it to go stale, adding a little pineapple juice and coconut as you go. But like me, you needn’t be restricted by Nigella’s recipe. I’m sure there are truffles just begging to be made out of anything – stale blueberry muffins, a chocolate cake that didn’t rise, the last of a lemon and poppyseed loaf (which would probably be equally sensational coated with dark chocolate as it would white). Let your imagination run wild. And as for Jo Seagar’s book, like I said I’m not put off and I’ll definitely be trying something else out of it soon. It would be fantastic to hear from any other kiwis out there that have had success with this cake though. Surely the recipe must work or it wouldn’t have made it into the book at all, yes?
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Like Julia Murney (and Patti LuPone before her) in Evita, my mother will be able to say “What’s new, Buenos Aires,” as she is now officially in South America. I look forward to using this newfangled invention they call Skype to keep in touch with all her exciting news. My younger brother is heading to Australia next week to help out a dear family friend of ours at the motel she owns, and my dad, keeping it local, is working hard with the help of others on maintaining momentum in the fight against the intensely dislikeable Pukekohe Waste Petroleum Combustion Ltd who, as I’ve said time and again, are trying to render Otaua Village a lifeless vacuum by thwacking an unwanted waste oil plant there, regardless of the children, livestock and history that the place is teeming with and with full knowledge of the fact that we don’t have a lot of money or resources to fight them with. Very admiral stuff.

The reason that Otaua Village is so present in my mind is because I was just there on the weekend – which also accounts for my rejuvenated vigour in trying to promote and defend our cause. The reason I was up home is because Tim and I were fortunate enough to be able to go to see The Who with Dad and my brother Julian. Well, what’s left of the Who. People of a certain age and perhaps background (like the man who owns the chip shop down the road) will scoff and say “that’s not the real Who,” well, that’s what they’re calling themselves and I’ll take it, especially as I’m only 22 and it’s the only way I’ll ever come close to experiencing this sort of zeitgeist-embodying, era-defining music, the sort of music that many people of my generation listen to on their iPods with a yearning nostalgia for an age they never even born in. I could describe the evening for you but instead I’ve gathered my thoughts together in the form of a bad poem.

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The Who
Saturday, 21st of March
Our seats are excellent
If I had a dollar for every mullet haircut
Hello Sailor are the opening band and hearing Gutter Black live is a joy
Then the Counting Crows, who play…competently
Feelings of mild ambivalence towards them
turn into feelings of “Why are you here and why are you not the Who already”
The man sitting next to me eats slice after slice after slice of plastic-wrapped, processed cheese
the scariest cheese of all
Finally The Who appear
Roger Daltrey dapper and youthful of face, Pete Townshend wearing a hat
They are wonderful
Both in good voice
Nearly faint from the brilliance of Baba O’Riley
The knowledge that my godfather, a longtime Wholigan and fan to end all fans is in the audience makes me even happier
Forgot how fab the guitar riff from My Generation is
Their background videos rival Roger Waters’ for dizzying intensity
Hey! Ringo Starr’s son is on drums!
Feel benevolent towards the world, even the horrible tall people in front of me
A bittersweet feeling at the end with just Daltrey and Townshend onstage together…
Praise mercy our dubiously parked car was not towed away
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Next time: I just got a bunch of second hand Cuisine magazines and I’m in one of those I-want-to-cook-and-bake-everything moods but I haven’t really got anything specific planned yet.

last of the summer whine

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I can’t buy cherries. They don’t exist. They are neither on the shelf at the corner shop or on the stands at the vege market. Their season has passed. And it’s probably just as well, because had my addiction to them been allowed to continue, my future children would never enjoy things like shoes, or a university savings fund. All financially debilitating fruit-eating habits aside, it was my lack of cherries that really made it clear that summer is fast melting into autumn, like an icecream inadvertantly dropped on a hot, concrete footpath. The mornings are darker, the evenings cooler, the cardigans emerging from the bottom drawer. Waah!

Having thrown all that bleak imagery at you, I should point out that this weekend has been absolutely gloriously sunny. Yesterday Tim and I, along with my godsister Hannah who has started university down here, took advantage of said weather and bussed out to Lyall Bay to the Maranui Surf Cafe. They hardly needs my endorsement – it was absolutely packed and there was a constant stream of people through the door. We had to wait for a table, which made me feel a little nervous – after all, it was my idea to shlep all the way out there in the first place – but it really wasn’t that long before we were seated. Somehow, even with my chronic uselessness riding against us, we ended up with the best table in the house – in the centre of a huge picture window, gazing out over the sea.

There’s a reason why it’s always packed – the food was fantastic. I had the big vegetarian breakfast and Tim had the regular big breakfast (I gave him some of my avocado and he gave me some of his kransky), and I kid you not, it was the best of its type that I’ve had in Wellington. Every cafe under the sun has some form of “Big Breakfast” and they can be anything from boring to meanly portioned and soggy. But this was incredible – generous amounts of avocado and pesto, large, glossy mushrooms, softly poached eggs, wonderful grainy bread and tomatoes that were so delicious I could have eaten a kilo of them on their own. I mean, I’m actually considering ringing and asking where they got them from. I wish I’d thought to bring my camera. Personable service and not-entirely-terrifying prices means I’ll definitely be back but with my 9-5 job the weekend is my only option, so maybe try to go on a weekday if you can when it’s likely to be more chilled out.

One more thing – the big breakfasts are really, really filling. I mean, I’m quite the horse when it comes to appetite size but was forced to concede bitterly that I didn’t have any space for one of the many enticing cakes on the counter. In fact, several hours later Tim and I still didn’t really feel like much for dinner. Unusual. So while Tim did his readings for Honours, I flung together something fairly light that wouldn’t be burdensome on our constitutions.

While brown rice was on the boil, and a foil-wrapped beetroot was roasting away in the oven, I assembled feta cheese, capers, sliced preserved lemon (made by my godmother), walnuts, and grated carrot. The beetroot was chopped into chunks and along with everything else, spatula-d into the drained rice and piled into two bowls. Delicious, and the sort of thing you can basically eat a vat of without feelings of self-loathing and regret arising after. While the making and eating of dinner was going on, we listened to a greatest hits CD of Joe Cocker. I’d just like to point out that on the whole I hate greatest hits compilations, and I wasn’t entirely committed to listening to J-Cock all evening, but as it turns out I’d somehow forgotten how much I love the old so-and-so. Every song was pure gold. The man’s a genius! Who else on earth can cover the Beatles so lavishly and not only get away with it, but sound brilliant? I also like how the album ended with killer song She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, and not, like many other artists’ greatest hits albums, with an ill-advised late nineties hip-hop disco remix collaboration track.

I found this recipe on Scrumptious blog for Eggplant and Tomato Curry. It’s easy to make and tastes fantastic – I can see it becoming a regular fixture so long as the ingredients stay cheapish at the market.

Above: I added cauliflower because I had some kicking round and thought it might bring a bit more substance. I guess if you wanted you could add some coconut milk or use different vegetables, even adding meat of some kind – it’s quite a nice starting point recipe for tinkering round with. Speaking of tinkering round, I received a bottle of passionfruit vinaigrette for Christmas from my brother and apart from drinking the stuff straight from the bottle because it’s so delicious, I’ve been trying it in all sorts of things, including as a marinade for chicken breasts. If you don’t actually have the Wild Appetite vinagrette like I do, I’d use a mix of pineapple juice, olive oil, a pinch of tumeric and a splash of cider vinegar. I cooked the chicken on our George Foreman Grill, which caramelised the sugar in the marinade, imparting a smoky deliciousness.

I sliced the chicken into chunks and served it with roasted beetroot, spinach, and brown rice. I’m not sure what I was really going for but it seemed to work, and I can highly recommend the vinaigrette-as-marinade route…I’m sure Paul Newman’s dressing would be incredible!

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Overheard in our kitchen:

Tim: So really, capers are just like really small olives?
Laura: Yeah, more or less. So why is it that you like capers but not olives?!?
Tim: Maybe if you cut the olives up into tiny little pieces?
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Next time: I get old-school with Girl Guide biscuits, and bake a cake with only four ingredients, none of which are butter or eggs. Yeah, I’m suspicious too, and I haven’t actually tasted it yet so if it has all the flavour of a well-boiled sponge I’ll probably just conveniently forget that I said I’d blog about it…if it turns out well then you’ll just have to wait for the next post to see what these four mysterious ingredients are!

souperstar (do you think you’re what they say you are)

15 Comments

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Beetroot soup. Not the most wildly titillating words someone could whisper in your ear. Especially…lukewarm beetroot soup. But beetroot soup must have something going for it if Nigella Lawson has no less than three different recipes for it. And if anyone can bring the titillation, it’s La Lawson. I mean, I say this as a beetroot fan from way back, but this following soup is not only delicious in the traditional sense – it tastes good – it’s also visually delicious. Check it out…

This soup is the deepest crimson, perhaps what the word “love” would look like if someone threw it in a blender and added vegetable stock. Sorry, got a bit carried away there with my imagery. Look how beetroot affects me so.

Having said that, I didn’t entirely follow Nigella’s recipes, I sort of did a cross between the one from How To Eat and the one from Forever Summer. To clarify, the soup from HTE is basically boiled beetroot blended with stock, while the FS one is roasted beetroot blended with stock and sour cream. I roasted the beetroot but didn’t add sour cream…wait, are you still interested?

Roasted Beetroot Soup

2 large beetroot (I’m talking actual beetroot, not anything from a can)
1 teaspoon ground cumin (I actually used ras-el-hanout because I am a bit addicted to it)
1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
Optional:
250g sour cream (which I didn’t use but I’m sure is nice)
Feta and capers to serve

Wrap the beetroot in tinfoil and bake at 200 C for 1 and a half hours, or until you can plunge a cake tester into them easily. Unwrap partially and leave to cool somewhat, then carefully peel by rubbing off the skin (seriously, that’s what you do) and chop them roughly. Biff into a food processor and whizz till kind of pulpy. Add the stock…maybe in batches…and blitz once more until it resembles soup. Add the sour cream if you so wish, ladle into bowls and sprinkle over feta cheese and capers.

While you’re making soup you might as well get some bread on to go with. To be honest the beetroot soup doesn’t really need a carbohydrate chaperone, but if you’re making something a bit more lentil-and-vegetabley the following would be perfect. And it doesn’t even knead needing. I mean need kneading. Excuse me.

Above: And it’s nubblier than a sweater on The Cosby Show. It’s funny, the words ‘seedy’ and ‘grainy’ aren’t so attractive when used in conjunction with darkened streets and online video quality respectively, but when used to describe bread they become highly desirable adjectives.

This recipe comes from Nigella Express and is not entirely unrelated to a recipe from How To Be A Domestic Goddess, only simpler. It’s also a good example of why both books are so marvelous…

Lazy Loaf

200g best quality sugar-free muesli

325g wholewheat bread flour

1 sachet (7g) instant dried yeast

2 teaspoons sea salt, or 1 teaspoon table salt

250mls (1 cup) skim milk

250mls (1 cup) low-fat water (just kidding y’all, they haven’t invented that yet)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add the water. Mix all that together. Tip into a silicone loaf tin (or a normal one, lined with baking paper and flour). Put into a cold oven, then immediately turn to 110 C and leave for 45 minutes. After these 45 minutes are up, turn it up to 180 C and bake for a further hour. Unorthodox, yes, but once you have completed these simple tasks you’ll have a loaf of real bread.

If you don’t have actual muesli to hand, you can just use about 180g rolled oats and make up the rest (and then some) with any dusty kibbled bits you have to hand – wheatgerm, amaranth, linseeds – in this modern age I know you have something like that in your pantry. I basically threw everything at it – all of the above plus poppy seeds, ground linseeds, kibbled rye and bran. Which is why I wasn’t in the slightest bit stressed that I only had plain white bread flour. You should also know that this is wonderful the next day, sliced and grilled and shmeered with avocado (which is what we had for breakfast this morning).

Above: And like everything in life, brilliant with butter.

Cultural roundup time! Are you ready to absorb my recommendations? On Monday, Tim and I went to see a singer called Jolie Holland. That’s right, the word Jolie is being used without “Angelina” preceding it. She was absolutely stunning, with a kind of old-school blues vibe about her. I’m talking 1800s old-school. She had an absolutely gorgeous voice, she bantered generously with the crowd and, non-insult to non-injury, she did a cover of a Leonard Cohen song (the ever-stunning Lady Midnight, for those of you playing at home.) She played guitar on many songs but we were lucky enough to see her play a kind of rough-hewn violin-fiddle thing (yes, that would be the technical term) and for her lengthy encore she invited the warm-up act, a man whose name eludes me, to sing with her. And it is a shame that I can’t remember his name because he was quite a gem – if some of his songs did sound a little similar to each other it didn’t matter because the voice he sung them in was so rich and lovely.

Last Saturday we went to Te Papa museum to see the Monet painting exhibition. If any of my readers are passing through Wellington I heartily recommend it, I’m a bit of a geek for the Impressonists and have been since I was a child (it’s no wonder I was so popular) so it was a genuine thrill for me to see some of the exemplary works of this period up close and personal. And, be still my beating heart, included in the mix were two Degas sketches and a sculpture…

On Thursday I had a double-bill night, beginning with Tick…tick…Boom! at the Garden Theatre which was everything I’d hoped – ie, it didn’t suck – and followed by the band of Montreal. It was, for reasons mentioned last time, hugely exciting for me to see TTB live, and the cast seemed to be as happy performing in it as I was watching them. They all sang gorgeously, had sparky chemistry, and really seemed to get the characters as opposed to just singing the lines with their faces forming the appropriate expressions. Erm, I could go on. I actually saw it again on Friday night, which should tell you a lot about me as a person. But truly, I can’t say enough nice things about this production. Hearing those fantastic songs live – magic.
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of Montreal were brilliant live, lead singer Kevin Barnes all enigmatic and urchin-like with his blue eyeshadow and orange sparkly tunic. Although light on banter they were heavy on theatrics – including a fellow who came out wearing an impressive array of animal masks and a grey-leotarded person who would swing from bars on the ceiling – and the music was a ton of loved-up swirly-electro fun. The audience was painfully hip (lots of carefully chosen vintage dresses, arty tshirts, canvas shoes and disdainful looks) and there is, in my heart, a special dark hatred reserved only for the bloke in front of me who was not only tall and bouffant-y of hair, but, insult upon insult, wearing a large trilby hat, the circumference of which completely blocked my view as he swayed intuitively from left to right at the very same time as me. May his view one day be obstructed in a similar manner. Hopefully by someone in a sombrero.
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Finally, speaking of soup – and back to food now – after purchasing a half-price can of chesnuts, I made the lentil and chesnut soup from How To Eat. Friends, it is extraordinarily good. It’s also not that photogenic. But I wanted to throw it open wide to you all, you foodie types, what would make a good substitute for the chesnuts? Because they’re too expensive to make this soup a regular option. I tried substituting potato, which was pleasant enough but too similar in texture to the cooked lentils to be really delightful. Any thoughts?

schmalentines

9 Comments

With the briefest of glances o’er the foodblogosphere (yes, that is a word…now…) I observe that there is a plethora of pink-tinted, heart shaped, chocolate festooned Valentine-themed food going on. I personally don’t go in for Valentine’s Day myself, considering it a bit commercial and far too likely to inflict bitterness upon the firmly un-coupled out there. However there is a tiny, miniscule part of me that secretly wouldn’t mind being whisked off to Paris for the weekend or being presented with a sculpture of my own head made from chocolate mousse, or being forcibly thrown by forklift into a rose garden or whatever it is they do for Valentine’s in the movies. My actual day involved, would you believe it, nothing of the sort. Instead Tim’s friend, sister, sister’s friend, ex-flatmate, and flatmate’s friend all appeared for drinks. Fun – fantastic to see ex-flatmate again – but hardly condusive to heart-shaped food. Nevertheless, people need feeding, and drinkers need blotting paper, so I made an enormous vat of pasta (Nigella Lawson’s Penne Alla Vodka from Feast, it is seriously good) and for dessert, in a nod to the season, I made a tray of chocolate brownies.

Most of the time I feel that a brownie is a brownie is a brownie, there are forty squillion recipes out there for them, all promising ultimate-ness and all being fairly similar. Nigella’s recipe is, in all honesty, cut from similar cloth to anything you’ve read about brownies before…only the proportion of ingredients is roughly quadruple anything you’ve ever fathomed. They make for an incredible finished product, but I’m warning you, don’t read the recipe if you are faint of heart and don’t have your smelling salts handy. They will cost you about $300 to make. There is no coy concession of this from Nigella herself of course. And it does make quite a lot…

Above: Doesn’t the batter look good? I mean, I’m not just looking at it, I’m positively leering. Don’t you just want to buy it a drink, tell it to “get in my wheelbarrow, you cheeky vixen” and take it home? Quoting the Mighty Boosh here by the way – that’s not my own personal pick up line (although you’re welcome to try it…)

Brownies for An Economic Recession (sarcastic title my own, Nigella goes for the somewhat more fanciful “Snow Flecked Brownies”, admittedly this book was published in 2004 so she wasn’t to know about the grim future. From Feast.

375g butter
375g best-quality dark chocolate (don’t go using cheap compound buttons now)
6 eggs
350g caster sugar
1 tablespoon real vanilla extract (as above, if it’s fake, leave it out)
225g plain flour
250g white chocolate buttons

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Line the base of a 33x23x5.5cm roasting dish with baking paper. That’s right. A big, proper roasting dish that you’d normally cook a side of pig in. This is serious, y’all.

1. Melt the butter and chocolate together gently. I tend to let the chocolate melt a bit first before adding the butter so they both finish at the same time…
2. In a big bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together. Carefully pour in the slightly cooled chocolate mixture and vanilla extract.
3. Fold in the flour, stir in the white chocolate buttons.
4. Carefully spatula the whole lot into the roasting dish, smoothing the top. Bake for 25 minutes. Don’t be tempted to go for longer. After spending half a week’s pay on butter, chocolate and eggs, you don’t want dry brownies. Cut into squares when cooled some.

These are really, really good. I’m getting a little twitchy now just looking at pictures of them, knowing that they are right there in a tin in my wardrobe and I could grab one right now…yes, in my wardrobe, and hey, don’t judge, the kitchen in my flat is not quite visible to the naked eye and therefore one has learned to be creative with storage space. Which is why canned tomato, dried pasta and black beans jostle for position with my Swiss ball and my collection of high heels. If I call the whole set-up ‘charmingly bohemian, like RENT’ it’s not so annoying. Although it would be much easier to actually be charmingly bohemian if I lived in a loft in New York. Anywho…

I could just eat the whole lot…no one would need to know…

If Valentine’s Day is something you go in for, I hope it went well for you. Tim was working more or less all of the big day so I looked out for number one and went shopping. I bought myself some books with a voucher I had – The Cook School Recipes by Jo Seagar and Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Both just jumped out at me, I didn’t set out with anything in mind to use my voucher for. Jo Seagar – despite her heavy use of sweet chilli sauce in everything – has always endeared herself to me. She seems to particularly excel at writing inspiring recipes for nibbles and baking, and since those are my two favourite food groups it makes sense that I should gravitate towards her. Plus I like the idea of supporting NZ cooks in these uncertain times. As for Everything Is Illuminated, I casually picked it up, read the first couple of lines, and knew instantly that it was something special. I’m only halfway through but – unless it descends into a chaos of derivative rubbish – I highly recommend it.

It is worth mentioning that on Friday night we caught up with our friend Dr Scotty who is finally back from his sojourn to Thailand and Cambodia. He returned looking all sleek and tan and it was SO cool to see him again. The fact that he got to New Zealand on Thursday and yet was able to converse to me about watermelon sorbet the very next night is testament to the rare breed of cool that he possesses.

Next time: I make beetroot soup, and it’s really really good.